Alan Parsons Bio

Alan Parsons (b. 20 December 1948 in London) is a British audio engineer, musician, and record producer. He was involved in the production of several successful albums, including The Beatles' Abbey Road and The Dark Side of the Moon, for which Pink Floyd credit him as an important contributor. Parsons' own group, The Alan Parsons Project, as well as his subsequent solo recordings have also been commercially successful.

In October 1967, at age 18, Parsons went to work as an assistant engineer at Abbey Road Studios, where he earned his first credit on the LP, Abbey Road. He became a fixture there, engineering such projects as Paul McCartney's Wild Life and Red Rose Speedway, five albums by The Hollies, and Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, for which he received his first Grammy Award nomination. He was known for going beyond what would normally be considered the scope of a recording engineer’s duties. He considered himself to be a recording director, likening his contribution to recordings to what Stanley Kubrick contributed to film. This is apparent in his work with Al Stewart's Year of the Cat, where Parsons added the saxophone part and transformed the original folk concept into the jazz-influenced ballad that put Al Stewart onto the charts. It is also heard in Parsons’ influence on the Hollies’ He Ain't Heavy, He’s My Brother and The Air That I Breathe, sharp departures from their 1960s pop Stay, Just One Look, Stop! Stop! Stop! or Bus Stop. Parsons was also known to have swapped shifts during the engineering of The Dark Side of the Moon so he could work entirely on the project.